I. Education.

• Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.
• If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
• We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
• May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve. - Theresa Cha, in Dictee (Cha attributes these words to Sappho when she was the one who wrote them.)

II. Life.

• Comfort can be a dangerous thing. You stick around home all the time where it’s safe and nothing ever changes, and before you know it, you get set in your ways and you quit learning, you quit changing, you don’t grow anymore.
• I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.
• Small acts lead to great acts. Apathy is the killer.----Small initial acts can start a progression on a continuum that leads to heroic resistance.
• This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
• I know today is Monday and you assume it’s going to suck, but according to statistics, there will be over 5,000 weddings, 10,000 childbirths, and 42 million hugs occurring today throughout the United States. Also today, there will be at least 4 people that will win the multimillion dollar lotteries, 600 people will get promotions at work, and 3,000 people will lose their virginity. There will also be 600 dogs adopted, 35,000 balloons sold, and 800,000 skittles eaten. Plus, the words “I love you” will be said over 9 million times. So again, I know today is Monday and you assume it’s going to suck, but just smile, because according to statistics, it should actually be a really nice day.
• Living with regret is much harder than living with defeat. You've come this far. If you settle now, I'm afraid you lose something far worse than a trial. (Eli Stone)
• If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.
• We are often more afraid than we wish to be, but we can always be braver than we expect.
• What a treacherous thing, to believe a person is more than a person.
• Success is not final; failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.
• Don’t waste time being shy.
• You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
• It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live.
• A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
• If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then give up. There's no use in being a damn fool about it.
• We acquire the strength we have overcome.
• That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
• Men have called me a feminazi, frigid, a bitch, but it all boils down to: 'You don’t need my validation, and that scares me.'
• The best stuff is in the mistakes.
• Nobody cares what you do. / Please be yourself to death.
• Don’t be seduced into thinking that which does not make profit is without value.
• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
• We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
• People often say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves.
• And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
• You have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.
• It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.
• It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
• People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.
• There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
• When I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up — many people feel small, ’cause they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.
• Until you die. / Or it dies in you.
• Once you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
• You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.
• For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.
• Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world, for, indeed, that's all who ever have.
• You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.
• Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
• May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. / I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.
• You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.
• Transcript from 'The Roald Dahl Treasury' of an interview on the BBC World Service:
  • Roald: I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I'll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.
  • Interviewer: Or brains even?
  • Roald: Oh gosh, yes, brains is one of the least. You can be a lovely person without brains, absolutely lovely. Kindness - that simple word. To be kind - it covers everything to my mind. if you're kind that's it.
• The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
• Have the courage to live. Anyone can die.
• The curious paradox is, that, when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
• Mistakes are proof that you are trying.
• Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

III. Love.

• Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
• I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. Like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street and even if they were really weird and had no friends at school, I think after seeing them at their most vulnerable you wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with them.
• I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, “Hi.” They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.
• Angela Montenegro: You have this bourgeois notion...
  • Dr. Lance Sweets: Bourgeois?
  • Angela Montenegro: ...that in order for love to be real it has to be permanent. Nothing is permanent. That's just a fact. We move in and out of loving other people, but that doesn't make the love any less real.
• 'I love you' means that I accept you for the person that you are, and that I do not wish to change you into someone else. It means that I will love you and stand by you even through the worst of times. It means loving you even when you’re in a bad mood, or too tired to do the things I want to do. It means loving you when you’re down, not just when you’re fun to be with. ‘I love you’ means that I know your deepest secrets and do not judge you for them, asking in return that you do not judge me for mine. It means that I care enough to fight for what we have and that I love you enough not to let go. It means thinking of you, dreaming of you, wanting and needing you constantly, and hoping you feel the same way for me.
• People always say that it’s harder to heal a wounded heart than a wounded body. Bullshit. It’s exactly the opposite – a wounded body takes much longer to heal. A wounded heart is nothing but ashes of memories. But the body is everything. The body is blood and veins and cells and nerves. A wounded body is when, after leaving a man you’ve lived with for three years, you curl up on your side of the bed as if there’s still somebody beside you. That is a wounded body: a body that feels connected to someone who is no longer there.
• Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.